SEARCHENGINES
Google Says Fluff Content Makes It Hard For Search Engines To Understand

Google’s John Mueller the other day said on Twitter the example given to him was “less about duplicate content, and more about fluff.” He said when it comes to fluff content, it makes “it hard for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say.”
The truth is, it seems like not only does Google crawl and index content fluff, but the search engine seems to prefer to rank content with a lot of fluff.
As you can imagine, that got some funny responses – because you and I know, Google prefers to rank content that is fluffier, even though its featured snippets just get to the point.
Let me share the context:
yes! this. almost every SEO audit I see that was previously done for a company is calling out random sentences or paragraphs and warning of “duplicate content penalties”
It’s sad.
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) January 7, 2022
And yet individual cases exist where duplicate content does harm sites. Thinning it out, consolidating and similar actions have been proven to significantly boost crawl efficiency, indexing volume, and traffic on sites I’ve audited where it was a problem.
— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) January 7, 2022
Here is John’s statement on fluff content to the last post Alan made:
But that’s less about duplicate content, and more about fluff. If you make it hard for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say, it’s no wonder they don’t recommend your pages for that.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022
Now, I love Ryan’s response:
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022
It is pretty true, not just with recipe content – although, it is the most obvious with recipe content that Google ranks in search.
It is a topic I covered before around word count and quality where I said I hate it “when someone adds a huge amount of fluff to their content – be it written or spoken – in order to fill space. Say what you need to say and get on with it. People have limited time on this planet, one thing we cannot do it give back time lost. So keep things short, to the point.”
There should be something about getting to your point, in your content, in the least amount of words, so that your users can convert faster or get what they need in a more efficient manner.
But until Google stops rewarding fluff – we will continue to produce fluff.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Layoffs, DOJ Sues Google, Search Console Content Ideas & Google Optimize Going Away, Yahoo Search Comeback

As I mentioned briefly last week, Google announced mass layoffs last week, and I discuss what I know so far about it. There are also reports that Google is pushing advertisers to use third-party resellers and not their internal staff. The DOJ sued Google again to break up its ad business. Microsoft announced its earnings, showing how Bing’s search ad growth continues to slow. Bing also may have had a search ranking algorithm update. Google Search Console content ideas beta feature may go away in March. Google Search Console Insights has an achievements section. Google confirmed a bug with some preferred languages in Google Search, and they blame mobile-first indexing. Google Ads had an outage on Monday morning that caused huge headaches. Google has no preferences between connected structured data and not connected structured data. Google will parse the image elements even when those elements are enclosed within other elements. Google published a new case study after 18 months, this one from Vimeo on video SEO. Google said generating tons of fake URLs on a site won’t cause SEO issues. Google Business Profiles now supports cars for sale inventory for US dealerships. Bing is testing infinite scroll. Google is testing two justifications in the local results. Google is also testing a new trusted store badge. Bing has a new menu for image search that uses a drop-down and adds explore and collect. Account-level negative keywords are now available on Google Ads. Google will sunset Google Optimize on September 30th. And it seems like Yahoo Search may be making a comeback to Search – that would be exciting. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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SEARCHENGINES
New Google Trusted Store Badge Test

Google is testing a new design for the trusted store badge in the paid shopping results. The Google Trusted Stores program to all U.S. merchants back in 2012, along with that came a badge in the search results to make those listings stand out.
FYI – here is how to qualify for this trusted store badge.
Brian Freiesleben spotted this new badge the other day and posted a screenshot on Twitter – here is that screenshot:
Curently, the badge looks more like this version from last year:
And the original one looked like this:
Brian said on Twitter, “Would love to see Google add this to organic products from trusted merchants as well, but not sure if that’s likely.”
Looks like Google is testing out a new badge for advertisers that are trusted merchants.
Would love to see Google add this to organic products from trusted merchants as well, but not sure if that’s likely 😉
Second screenshot is what appears after clicking the badge. pic.twitter.com/3lXIU9m04d
— Brian Freiesleben (@type_SEO) January 25, 2023
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Console Content Ideas Going Away March 28th

Last December, we caught Google testing an experimental feature named content ideas in Google Search Console. Well, yesterday, Google sent more invites to this feature but noted the feature is only available until March 28, 2023 and then it goes away.
Both Robin Dirksen on Twitter and Deepak Ness on Twitter shared screenshots of this feature but the new part is the March 28th date.
The email they received about this feature reads, “Note: This feature be available only until March 28, 2023, and only to select properties.” Then when you access the feature, there is a notice in the interface that says, “New! Get inspiration for new content (available until March 28).”
Here are those screenshots (click to enlarge):
We know this seems like the Question Hub feature and that Google Question Hub shut down this month. So maybe this content ideas feature is also shutting down but not until the end of March?
Here are more tweets with this:
Just received an email from Google Search Console about “Content ideas”
For me, it will be available till March 28 (2023) – what will happen after that is unknown (for now) pic.twitter.com/hjVtrStJXP
— Robin Dirksen (@robindirksen1) January 25, 2023
Here’s it: pic.twitter.com/thAvEgI95t
— DeepakNess (@DeepakNesss) January 25, 2023
Hmmm… This is interesting Introducing “Content ideas”: Get inspiration for new content from Google – has this been reported on yet @rustybrick ? pic.twitter.com/aUOt3sYoTJ
— @[email protected] (@ChuckPrice518) January 25, 2023
“content ideas” GSC feature (US based) company/website.@rustybrick reported it in December but looked to be exclusive to India/Pakistan.https://t.co/Pg0sQIEXAT pic.twitter.com/iGoQhfAzYe
— Nick LeRoy (@NickLeRoy) January 25, 2023
I do wonder if Google is only testing it until then and maybe will bring it to more users later or if Google is completely killing it off on March 28th?
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